User generated pricing?

You’ve heard of user generated content. But what about the concept of user generated pricing?

That’s the idea behind a five-month-old online music startup called SongSlide, which allows people to pick the prices that they want to pay for independent music. Currently, the average price for a song on the site is $1.69. There is a minimum bid price of 59 cents.

The startup was co-founded by musicians Devin Brewer and John Hurd, who came up with the idea after experimenting with new pricing models for concerts and CDs.

“Every time we let our fans choose how much to pay for our shows and CDs, we made more money than when we used a fixed price model,” says Brewer, who plays bluegrass, folk and country music.

Though SongSlide is in the early stages of development with about 70 artists in 22 genres, it has attracted some attention for its unique model.

Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, recently wrote that the honor system approach works well for indie musicians but doesn’t think “a major label would dare try it.”

And Mitch Ratcliffe at ZDNet notes that SongSlide represents a “kind of ‘new patronage’ in which everyone can participate.”

Brewer says that his goal is “to empower fans to become patrons of their favorite artists, even on a small scale.” The company also has filed a patent around the business method, with Brewer saying that the concept could be rolled out to other digital media products.

It also recently got a boost when Jason Schwartzman, star of the movie “Rushmore” and a budding song writer, signed up his Coconut Records on the site. Alexa Ray Joel, the daughter of Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, also recently linked up with SongSlide.

The sliding scale that the company has developed is pretty neat, allowing users to see how much money goes to the artist on each individual purchase. For example, a 99 cent purchase of Schwartzman’s song “Easy Girl” would produce 59 cents for him.